


Psychogenesis

by rivkat



Category: The Inside
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-25
Updated: 2009-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-05 06:34:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For cathexys, prompt: Web's background.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Psychogenesis

Paul found Rebecca’s file on Web by accident. If it was an accident to click on the file that said “Open Investigations,” anyway. He was only being proactive. Rebecca’d gone nearly two months without being cornered by a killer she was tracking. Like one of their unsubs, she was due.

Paul, Melody and Danny had discussed profiling Web before, in that half-joking way that meant they were all too scared to go through with it. The abyss had nothing on Web.

Rebecca hadn’t found Web’s foundational trauma. And she’d gone back _far_. School records, data about his parents and his—holy shit, his brother and sister; he came from an actual _family_\--transcripts of interviews with his doctor and his first-grade teacher and the principal of his middle school. Notes on conversations with members of his Boy Scout troop and some of their parents. Statistics on reported fires and animal deaths in his neighborhood. Scanned copies of papers he’d written in college. Leases, FBI instructor evaluations, even a speeding ticket.

“You won’t find it.”

Paul jumped, more startled than guilty. He’d been so engaged that he’d forgotten that he wasn’t supposed to be here.

When he turned, Rebecca didn’t look surprised, or angry. But then she rarely did. When she had his full attention, she began again. “You won’t find it because it’s not there.”

“He hid it,” Paul inferred. Whatever trauma had made Web into the serial killer-without-portfolio, sadistic genius manipulator that he was, of course the first thing he’d have done with his position at the FBI would have been to erase his tracks, just like Rebecca but on a bigger scale.

“No.” Rebecca’s voice was, as usual when she was working, bell-like in its clarity, certain down to the ground. “It’s not there because it doesn’t exist. It never did.”

“Are we talking about the same thing?” Paul stared up at her. Sitting in her chair, he felt almost small: she loomed haughty and cold above him, skin doll-perfect, like a girl on a billboard. “I mean, _something_ had to make Web into—what he is.”

“That’s what I thought,” Rebecca admitted, leaning over him, her arm brushing his shoulder as she took hold of the mouse and started closing documents. “But it’s not true.” She sounded—regretful? “He had a loving family, an idyllic upbringing, an unbroken record of success in school, and then in the FBI.”

“But—” Paul protested. There had to be—look at Rebecca herself, wringing a terrible brilliance from her own story, her own self-rescue.

“You thought he sees me as another version of himself,” she continued, inexorable. “Sometimes it’s not the circumstances, Paul. Sometimes it’s who you are.”

“Yeah, but _Web_\--I mean, manipulativeness that extreme, the amorality and the insight—”

“You found where I’d written my password down,” Rebecca interrupted. “Now that they make me change it every two weeks, I can never remember it. It was in an unusual location, but you found it because you know where to look.”

Paul’s mouth snapped shut. He doubted he could get away with claiming she’d forgotten to lock her desktop down. He hadn’t been _snooping_. Rebecca would have had to have a personal life before he could have pried into it. “I don’t—what are you getting at?” Paul asked, hating the near-whine in his own voice.

“I’m damaged,” Rebecca said, matter-of-fact, pulling back as she finished logging out. He felt a chill where they were no longer touching. “I’d need to be fixed before I could take on Web’s authority, and we all know that would require too much downtime, if it’s possible at all. I’m not Web’s heir, Paul.”

He knew what she was about to say, and she knew he knew, but sometimes it was the words itself that made a thing real. More real than his doubts and his curses and the wall that had built itself between him and Karen. Real as his ambitions, real as his need to bring a perpetrator down. He closed his eyes and tried to feel sick, or guilty, but instead there was only the sense of a puzzle piece clicking neatly into place.

“You are.”


End file.
